What He Doesn't Know (What He Doesn't Know Duet, #1)

by Kandi Steiner

“I learned the people we love usually turned out to be one of three things: a home, a holiday, or hell.”

They say there are two sides to every story, and I suppose in most cases, that’s true. But the one I lived inside of? It had three. On the northeast side of Mount Lebanon, Pennsylvania, there was a house. But there was no longer a home.

Did anyone even see me at all, or was I as dead to them as I felt inside?

Charlie Reid was married, she was Charlie Pierce now, and still, it didn’t matter. I loved her, anyway.

“Books aren’t meant to be in perfect shape,” she said when we reached her room. “They’re meant to be read, to be inhaled like oxygen.” Her fingers ran over the spine again, and she smiled. “This book has been breathed. It’s been loved.”

the more I realized I didn’t want to be silent any longer. And I didn’t want to sit still, either.

“For the same reason you don’t hold your hand in a fire just because it’s warm,” I answered. “Because it burns.”

I wished there was a warning signal for when Reese was around me, wished my brain could somehow alert me before my body had the chance to react.

“They’re just not where you can see them. But you can feel them.”

but there’s a reason you’re still living, Reese. And they would want you to live happily.”

Death changes us. It takes everything we thought we knew about our lives and fast pitches it out the window, shattering the glass in the process. Wind whips in, hard and cold, and throws everything we’d had neatly in place flying around the room. No one is the same once they lose someone they love. They just have to learn to exist in the new world, no matter how messy it is.

He was right there, my husband, and yet he was nowhere near me at all. I wondered if we’d ever really be in the same room ever again.

“I’m married, Reese. That’s all there is to it. I don’t get to run out on him and find comfort in you, and you don’t get to have me.”

“No. You don’t get to say that to me. You don’t get to tell me that you miss me, and you definitely do not get to say that it’s our friendship that you miss.”

She needed me like she needed air in her lungs, like she needed books in her hands, like she needed to feel whole again.

I didn’t want to live an unhappy life any longer trying to make something work that wouldn’t.

“If I am a river, you are the ocean. It all comes back to you in the end.”

But if I was a river, and he was the ocean, then Cameron was the storm that raged over the point where we met. And lightning was about to strike.

I knew my wife was cheating on me. I’d known for longer than I’d admit — to her or to myself. Maybe it was because I should have seen it coming.

“And sometimes we even hurt each other. But at the end of the day, we’re a family — and that will never change.”

“You don’t love him,” he repeated, his gaze hard. “You love the idea of him, the idea of what he used to be to you, and of what he never was.”

They say there are two sides to every story, and it was in that moment, in that dark, desperate snapshot of my life that I realized I hadn’t asked him for his.